The myth of the Newgrange "white quartz facade"

 

I was intrigued to see, in the latest "distant stone sources" paper from MPP and his merry gang, that the source of the quartz used in the facade of Newgrange came from around 80 km away, to the south.  See Fig 1 in the article, and text pafe 114.  As far as I know, there is not a shred of evidence to support this contention. Cooney (2000) and Stout (2002) are cited as references, but I am not aware of any geological research that might confirm that the quartz cobbles and blocks were taken from the Wicklow Mountains (near Glendalough).  That piece of the myth is repeated over and again in social media.

It's true that there is abundant white quartz associated with old mine workinga at Glendalough,  but this does not mean that this was a source for the quartz used at Newgrange!  It is disingenuous of MPP et al to pretend that this is a "known provenance" -- quartz veins )some thick, some thin) are ubiquitous across the landscape, and it is notoriously difficult to provenance any given lump of quartz unless it has some truly unique characteristics.   There is simply no reason to doubt that if (and this is a big "if") quartz blocks really were collected up and used at Newgrange for ornamental or "architectural" purposes, they were simply picked up across the landscape in the vicinity of the monument.

Yet another example of mythology being presented as fact............  

Parker Pearson, M., Bevins, R., Bradley, R., Ixer, R., Pearce, N. and Richards, C. ‘Stonehenge and its Altar Stone: the significance of distant stone sources’. Archaeology International, 2024, 27 (1), pp. 113–37 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/AI.27.1.13

This is interesting:

https://aliisaac.substack.com/p/controversy-at-newgrange